The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 Review: Featuring EVGA
by Ryan Smith on September 26, 2014 10:00 AM ESTThe Test
Quickly touching on the subject of compatibility, as readers of last week’s GTX 980 review may recall, we had initial compatibility issues with our GTX 970 FTW that prevented us from including it in our review. Since then NVIDIA has been able to isolate the issue and has put together the 334.16 drivers, which include a fix for the problem we were seeing. So we are now up and running. NVIDIA tells us that the issue only impacted certain motherboards (such as our ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional), and as far as we can tell that appears to be correct, as we have not seen any other reports of compatibility issues.
Moving on, for the purposes of our testing we will be looking at both the GTX 970 FTW in its shipping configuration and in a reference clocked configuration. EVGA has given us the reference GTX 970 vBIOS to flash to this card (taking advantage of the triple BIOS feature), allowing us to turn it into a standard GTX 970 for that part of our testing.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon R9 290X AMD Radeon R9 290 AMD Radeon R9 280X AMD Radeon HD 7970 AMD Radeon HD 6970 EVGA GeForce GTX 970 FTW ACX 2.0 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA Release 344.07 Beta NVIDIA Release 344.16 Beta AMD Catalyst 14.300.1005 Beta |
| OS: | Windows 8.1U1 Pro |
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JarredWalton - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
There are plenty of older (but still decent) PSUs that only have 6-pin PEG connectors, and 6-pin to 8-pin adapters are never a good idea IMO.cobalt42 - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
I believe at least one released card does use a single 8-pin connector.jmke - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link
Asus strix 970 DC2OC uses a single 8-pin connectorHrel - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Remember you guys saying Nvidia is working from the low end up, no longer top down. Well, they should start releasing cards that way. I don't care about your overpriced space heaters, I care about the cards between $100 and $200. Release those first!cobalt42 - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
They did -- the 750 and 750Ti are the first generation Maxwell cards, released earlier this year. They didn't break new ground in price/performance, but they did in price/watt.anandreader106 - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
You mean performance/watt.Houdani - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
I think it's finally time to upgrade my vintage 460 to one of these 970's. I don't plan on upgrading my ancient i7 930 (Nahelem, Bloomfield) just yet.I think I can eek more life out of my rig by bumping the GPU and keeping the rest of the innards the same for another year or two. I'm just surprised that I was able to get 4 good years out of that little 460 (mated with a 1080P monitor).
CaptainSassy - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Exactly the same rig and monitir but i will continue sitting on it :D 329$ is still pricy, i'll wait for true 200$ championwetwareinterface - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
there won't be a $200 champion. the bang for buck cards are in the $300 and above price tier right now and for the foreseeable future. it was the r9 290 and now it's the 970. the next one i predict will be the 290's replacement it will have the texture compression of the 285 and be their second down part.just4U - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
The $200 champion appears to really be the 280 atm for those sitting on older cards.. I'd like to say the 285 but it's higher up in the price bracket. The 960 should be interesting though when it comes out but I doubt it will be a $200 card.. Looking at the 970.. Im guessing it will sit at the $250 price point.